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27 April 2012

The "Guillotine" effect of Adoption

Often, I have read the various search phrases that bring people to my blog and think about posts I could do regarding those search terms and then I just don't get around to writing them. Tonight, I saw this search term: "how does the 1955 adoption act have the effect of a statutory guillotine" and felt it was a good question and relevant to my blog because I do use the word guillotine often when I post/speak about adoption law.

The word "guillotine" is quite graphic and conjures images of gruesome decapitations. The guillotine offered a swift execution, a clean decapitation if you will - more pleasant than previous methods of decapitations with axes, swords and the like which would take at least two blows or more depending on the prisoner. The guillotine was quick and efficient, and ensured there was no suffocation.

Yes, gruesome but the crucial part to me here is the effect of the guillotine - and how it relates to adoption.

When a person is adopted, they are completely cut out of their family's life - the law makes its as if they were never related. This severing is the same as what happens with a guillotine. Swift, brutal, final.

When a mother places or loses her child to adoption, she becomes a complete stranger to that child. As if they were never connected. As if those months of nurturing, of loving, of worrying never happened. This is reflected in the falsified birth certificate which replaces the mother's name with that of the adoptive mother's - and it is made out, in the law, as if this stranger was the one who gave birth. Mother and child, one of the most sacred relationships of all time, recognised as such outside adoption, is made out to be non-existent with a rubber stamp and a few signatures. Adoption, like a blade, cuts that most precious relationship away from both. Thus, the Guillotine.

The child experiences this (besides other experiences) by way of his or her family tree being brutally cut off and all those who went before her or him, all those who existed in her/his family for generations stretching back in time, wiped away. By law, adopted persons are magically grafted into their adoptive families' heritage... negating the fact they have another family, another heritage - one that flows through their veins, shows in their personalities, in their being. The guillotine of adoption law wipes it all out.

The so called ruse of Open Adoption does not change this. Given open adoption does not actually exist legally, there is no recognition of a mother who wants to see her child and be part of her child's life. Because in the eyes of the law, she is no one. She is nothing. She is merely a stranger - to the law, she may as well be someone walking down the street. The fact the connection she shares with her child is more than anyone will ever experience with her child ever, vanishes, poof! Because the law of adoption dictates this.

Adoption law is not a loving law. There is no love, no compassion in this brutal hacking of a family. Adoption law is anti-family in a way. It does not care for the best interests and welfare of a child, it only serves the best interests and welfare of adults. Regardless of the intentions of those who seek to adopt, the law of adoption is not child centric. It is actually cruel. It is barbaric in many places. And it supports dishonesty in the way it is set up. Love is not cutting a child out of her/his family. Love is not re-writing a factual document to reflect a mis-truth. Love is not pretending one gave birth to another mother's baby (my daughter's adoptress created a labour and birth story. Truly. And then denied it when I confronted them.). Love is not applying a guillotine to a child's life and severing centuries of family history. Love is none of those things and adopters who fool themselves into thinking that adoption is loving and compassionate are not seeing the full picture and are only seeing what they want to see.

When I lost Amber, I wrote endless journal posts about how I felt my head had been cut off and my heart had been torn out. Again, the guillotine.

Amber is lost to me. Legally, it is as if she never existed. Regardless of what ethics and morality say, regardless of what my hospital records show, the truth is, by law, my daughter, whom I carried inside me, in my heart, in my spirit, in my soul, is a stranger to me. That is the law. That is the reality. That is Adoption. And that is the guillotine effect I speak of so often.

Reunion will not change this for us. She will still be seen as the child of those who brutally took her from me, by law. As their daughter. I will be the stranger. Not them as they should be. I have been severed from her life, and she from mine. And just like a decapitation, there is no way to put us back together again.

5 comments:

Peach said it. This is so powerful. I was placed for adoption against my dad's will. He spent years searching for me. He has said many times that Catholic Charities might as well have just cut off his arm or his leg. Because that's what losing me felt like--he lost a part of himself. The guillotine is a perfect analogy.

In the ruling it stated that the adoptee and the plaintiff (half-sibling if I remember correctly) shared no common ancestor because the mother had given up her legal right to parent the adoptee. The statement "no common ancestor" has really stuck with me.

About Me

My name is Myst and I am the mother of three children, one whom I lost to forced adoption in New Zealand in 1998. I use this blog to share my story so others may be better informed of adoption practises in New Zealand and not lose their child in the same way I did.

Some quotes I love...

"This story had its beginnings in a wrongful belief that women could be separated from their babies and it would all be for the best. Instead, these churches and charities, families, medical staff and bureaucrats struck at the most primal and sacred bond there is - the bond between a mother and her baby"

"How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on when in your heart, you begin to understand there is no going back? There are some things time cannot mend, some hurts that go to deep... that have taken hold."- Frodo, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

“Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologise for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you are right and you know it, speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.”-Gandhi

“Man has the capacity to pass on from generation to generation the wrongs that he has suffered whether they are overt or covert wrongs. And there is a whole generation of people who have suffered from the inhumanity of our social service system because they were poor, because they were helpless, because they were young, because they had no advocates, because they were treated unjustly, because they were treated as though they had wronged people by having a child. We now have to call those social service systems to task.”- Family Involvement ‘Editorial’ John L. Brown No 5 (1977):1

"Regrettably, in many cases, the emphasis has changed from the desire to provide a needy child with a home, to that of providing a needy parent with a child. As a result, a whole industry has grown, generating millions of dollars of revenue each year..."- Commission on Human Rights, resolution 2002/92; E/CN/2002/79; page 25

"Hope is like a bird that senses dawn and carefully starts to sing while it is still dark."- Author unknown

“When a baby is born, a mother is born”-Adapted from a quote by Alice Meynell

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."-Martin Luther King, Jr.

“A mother’s love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world’s condemnation, a mother still loves on.”-Washington Irving

“Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”-Amnesty International

“There is in this cold and hollow world no fount of deep, strong deathless love save that within a mother’s heart.”-Felicia D. Hemans

"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all."-Dale Carnegie

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”Psalm 139:13, 14

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up. “-Anne Lamott

“No language can express the power and beauty and heroism and majesty of a mother’s love. It shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over the wastes of worldly fortune sends the radiance of quenchless fidelity like a star in heaven.”-E.H. Chapin